Principal Electrical Design Engineer - Compute

Position Title: Principal Electrical Design Engineer - Compute
Requisition : 1868
Position Location: Sterling, VA
Position

Reports To:

Director of Electrical Engineering
Supervises Others: No

At Trident Systems, we believe that strong engineering principles are fundamental to driving innovation and solving complex problems. We promote a culture characterized by rigorous engineering practices and a commitment to continuous improvement. This is achieved by leveraging our organization's collective expertise through collaborative development processes, which include thorough design and peer reviews. We can deliver innovative, high-performance solutions that meet our customers' evolving requirements by integrating our specialized knowledge in aerospace electronic systems with appropriately scaled development methodologies.

We are a mission partner supporting DoD, Intelligence Community, and Civil space customers. We develop complex, radiation effects mitigated, designs that balance competing requirements in modern space programs, delivering cutting-edge solutions that enable our customers to achieve more in space.

Position Summary

The Principal Electrical Design Engineer - Compute is responsible for the architecture, design, analysis, development, and verification of advanced aerospace computing electronics. This role supports new product development and evolution of Trident's space computing product line, including flight computers, processor and FPGA-based electronics, daughter cards, interface electronics, and supporting circuitry.

The Principal Electrical Design Engineer serves as a senior technical contributor throughout the hardware development lifecycle, from architecture and component selection through schematic design, analysis, PCB layout oversight, prototype bring-up, qualification, and production transition.

The ideal candidate has deep hands-on electrical design experience and is comfortable independently solving complex board-level problems involving high-speed digital interfaces, power, signal integrity, radiation environments, and aerospace reliability requirements.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Architect and design new aerospace computing electronics, including processor-based systems, FPGA-based systems, daughter cards, interface electronics, and supporting circuitry.
• Develop electrical architectures, schematics, component selections, interface definitions, and detailed board-level designs.
• Perform or lead electrical analyses including worst-case circuit analysis (WCCA), component derating, power analysis, timing analysis, signal integrity (SI), and power integrity (PI).
• Design and analyze high-speed digital interfaces such as DDR memory, PCIe, Ethernet, LVDS, and other high-speed serial and parallel interfaces.
• Design supporting analog and mixed-signal circuitry including power conversion, sequencing, monitoring, reset, clocking, sensor, and interface circuits.
• Develop radiation-effects-mitigation approaches appropriate for space electronics, including component selection, circuit-level mitigation, fault tolerance, and analysis of radiation-induced failure modes.
• Support radiation-effects analysis and testing, including consideration of total ionizing dose (TID), single-event effects (SEE), and other applicable space-environment effects.
• Select electrical components based on performance, reliability, radiation tolerance, lifecycle, availability, manufacturability, and program requirements.
• Develop and maintain component derating, parts analysis, and engineering documentation supporting flight hardware designs.
• Provide technical direction and oversight for PCB layout, including high-speed routing, controlled impedance, differential pairs, memory interfaces, power distribution, grounding, stack-up, and EMI/EMC considerations.
• Perform design trade studies balancing performance, SWaP-C, reliability, radiation tolerance, schedule, manufacturability, and lifecycle considerations.
• Lead and participate in schematic reviews, peer reviews, design reviews, and technical trade studies.
• Support prototype hardware bring-up, board-level debug, characterization, integration, and verification using laboratory instrumentation.
• Troubleshoot complex electrical issues involving processors, FPGAs, memory, power systems, high-speed interfaces, clocks, communication interfaces, and board-level circuitry.
• Develop hardware verification strategies and support development of engineering test plans, procedures, and acceptance criteria.
• Support environmental…